We’ve been homeschooling again since about mid-January. Jack was back in school as of September and I was actually his classroom teacher. But once again the Quebec government’s treatment of the school system during a pandemic had me scurrying us home.
We were teaching online the week after Winter break. During that week, we received so many emails about changing health protocols, about how teachers could be expected to teach multiple groups simultaneously because so many were out sick, about how bus lines could be cut due to driver illnesses. I felt myself slip into that panic zone from early 2020 and thought – how is it that two years later we are STILL reacting as if no one knew this was coming and everything is to continue as “normal”? I am so grateful that my previous employer accepted me back, no questions asked, so I didn’t need to stay in that mess. I am sad that my colleagues and friends do.
I’m glad that we are back home. So is Jack, for the most part. He misses recess and lunch a lot. Luckily there is Minecraft and video chat and he plays and chats with a solid core group of friends pretty much daily.
It is still a lot of work, homeschooling and working full-time, as well as you know, the laundry, cleaning, shopping, garbage day, feeding merry-go-round + making time to just be together and have fun 🙂 But we will never, ever miss the morning rush of getting to the bus stop by 7:25 am. Ever.
Because I registered him as a homeschooler after January 1, we have slightly less paperwork to deal with. Basically we can combine our status report with our end of year report instead of with a mid-year report because we aren’t obligated to complete one.
Last year we received our first contact from the Direction de l’enseignement à la maison (aka DEM) in June. This year was much quicker and we have already scheduled a monitoring meeting, where they basically check in to make sure we are following our learning plan, for mid-April.
Here is the learning project being monitored, approved by the DEM. They’d like me to fill in a pre-set form but I write my plans differently than they expect. All of a sudden in January I had to pan out the rest of Jack’s year and it helps me to get my head around what we are planning related to the competencies we are asked to show progression in when I make a presentation out of it. So this is more for me then for the DEM but my days are busy so instead of pulling out info to fit into their plan, I just submit the whole thing. Luckily, I was actively teaching the majority of his subjects earlier this school year so it wasn’t a stretch to match our home-based activities with the expected competencies.
(If you view the project as a slide-show, it’s easier to interact with the links within it. And also easier to read, there is a lot of info on each slide.)
We will start to fill in some of the blank areas with samples of work over the next little while, to facilitate our upcoming monitoring meeting with our DEM rep.
If this at all inspires you for your own Grade 5 learning project, feel free to use anything within it. You can use the whole thing, replacing pictures and other info with your child’s, or just copy/paste some lines that you feel will work with your child.